Tag Archives: elgin

Fresh at Paul Cluver

Fresh at Paul Cluver

If you'd like a treat, prepared with love and care, visit Fresh restaurant on the Paul Cluver estate. We took friends visiting from the UK on an outing over Sir Lowry's pass to the little district of Elgin. Fresh, our decided lunch-stop, certainly didn't disappoint. The food, the staff, the atmosphere and our table on the lawn beneath the trees was perfect. Just perfect.

Highlands Road Estate and the Elgin Valley wine festival

Highlands Road Estate and the Elgin Valley wine festival
In my previous post I mentioned our trip to Elgin and the Elgin Cool Wine and Country Festival on Saturday.

After tripping through a few estates, sampling the fruit of their vines, we ended up at Highlands Road Estate for lunch. The staff kindly set up a table for Dominique and I right next to the dam's edge before decorating it with a variety of gourmet pizzalings (which are pizzas, only smaller ;) paired with five glasses of their very best wine - two white, one rosé, and two red. I'm no food or wine connoisseur, but the little bit of sophistication that my taste-buds had was extremely pleasantly surprised with how well the pizza worked with the wine.

We spent the next hour or two sitting in the shade, listening to a solo singer with his friend on acoustic guitar sharing a few covers (one of which was Chasing Cars, by the legendary Snow Patrol). The combination of food and wine, alongside the quite water's edge, with soft background music was really pretty awesome.

Visit Highlands Road Estate for a relaxing lunch. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

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Wine in progress at lovely Belfield

Wine in progress at lovely Belfield
A wine-loving friend and I hopped into the car early yesterday morning and traveled the 70km through Cape Town's mist, and over Sir Lowry's mountain pass to the Elgin Valley's Elgin Cool Wine and Country Festival. We picked up our festival passes at the well-known-well-loved Peregrine Farm Stall just outside of the town of Grabouw and headed off to visit as many of the participating wine estates as we could manage.

Our first stop was at Belfield, a lovely boutique wine estate just around the corner from the Peregrine Farm Stall. The main photo in this post shows the contents of one of about 6 large plastic tubs filled with cabernet sauvignon grapes; the makings of the estate's award winning wine. Since we were the first to arrive at his estate, Mike Kreft (owner and wine maker) spent a few minutes explaining the mechanics around the grapes in the tubs.

What's interesting (and not the obvious from just looking at the tubs) is that the pressed husks, floating on top of of a 100-200mm layer of wine-to-be, are constantly releasing carbon dioxide during the fermentation process. The carbon dioxide hovers in a layer just above the husks and (besides for keeping the wine free from oxygen) effectively serves to wards off insects and other contaminating creatures from indulging in the fruits of Mike's labour.

Click on the thumbnails above to see a few more photos that I took on the wine farm's grounds.